Dance

Fase

Tramway, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

five stars

NEW works, unknown choreographers – these are the usual attractions of the Cottier Dance Project. In their final event, staged at Tramway, the CPD organisers brought iconic history centre-stage. Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, was first seen in 1982, but the bright, illuminating energy of its minimalism – like its choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker – defies the passage of time, the human stamina within its cool, rhythmic abstractions a stirring mix of intellectual gambits and flesh and blood virtuosity.

De Keersmaeker in nowadays partnered by Tale Dolven. Reich’s Piano Phase sees them stride on-stage, in fluid mid-calf frocks that flare deliciously when they sharply pivot on their preppy white sneakers. As the music loops, alters pace, but never slackens, the women answer its pulses with phrases of their own while – on the back wall – their shadows echo the whisking spins, the wheeling arms, the fluttering skirts. There’s already a fierce, geometric precision in the movement, but there is individuality within the mechanistic: the two shift, deliberately, in and out of synch by briefly altering their own pace; the flow remains mesmerisingly unbroken.

Come Out sees the women in work shirts, chinos and boots sitting on stools that become the centre of their narrow, turning world. Electronically syncopated text sends arms and upper torsos moving in meticulous spasms as they edge round, but never stand – constraint offset by the hands that move freely. The same costumes re-appear in Clapping Music, where rising on the toes of their sneakers feels like sparky games-play.

But the tour de force is de Keersmaeker’s solo, Violin Phase, where the 57-year-old wheeled through the space – spinning, kicking her legs high, flicking her skirt even higher – like a young girl finding her own, and Reich’s rhythms. Minimalism? Yes, and to the max of innovation, even now.